I looked up from the soil. “Whoever sent the man to HQ may have wanted any of us.”
The rest of the team were silent, watching. FireWind jutted his chin in agreement. “Your scent is like all living things. The scent of the ajasgili was like the earth of graves. Like the absence of life.”
I thought about Soulwood. About the vampire tree. About its image of killing me. What if I had misunderstood what it was saying? What if it wanted a sacrifice? Was asking permission. Or what if it was simply asking me to give it permission to live, knowing I could, and might someday, kill it? “Oh,” I breathed, my thoughts whirling as too many possibilities tried to find places inside me at once. I looked back at the potted cabbage and kept my eyes there. Without lifting them to LaFleur or FireWind, I said, “May I speak to you both privately?”
Somehow, they knew who I was talking about because the others left the room, Occam’s gaze on me in case I needed him. I shook my head, the tiniest shake, and he went on out. The door closed.
I raised my eyes and looked from Rick to FireWind. Rick’s once-black hair was a glacial white now. With the new age lines, he looked older than FireWind, though FireWind had decades more years. There was compassion in Rick’s near-black eyes, a kindness I hadn’t expected. I had missed him, a man I had detested at first. I had actually missed him. My eyes filled with tears.
“Nell?” Rick asked.
I realized they had been waiting for a while. I had forgotten to breathe while I thought. I inhaled hard. Blew out. Took another breath. “I might be able to stop her,” I said. “The ajasgili.”
Over the cell, which was still on, JoJo said, “Lainie’s searching for a familial connection between Carollette’s parents, something that might create an abnormal witch-type gene.”
I said, “It should be within just a few generations, based on the body buried on the old Ames farm, which was abandoned in the early to mid 1900s. Maybe after 1902 when the Myer witch family went underground.” I remembered the trees on the land. Some had seemed larger, older than I expected. The yinehi buried there had been like me, like my sisters, not an ajasgili.
The ajasgili was similar, except her magics drew life from the land and left it barren, and stored death in the land, opposite to the way that I gave life to the land. This ajasgili was feeding death to the land, storing and using that power. Feeding death to her enemies.
Was that similar to the way I had killed Brother Ephraim? Had I come close to becoming an ajasgili? Was it intent or was it all genetics? And if genetics, had Ephraim been gwyllgi? The grindylow, Pea, had confirmed that he wasn’t human. His life force had contaminated the earth.
What if Ephraim was ajasgili?
Leaves budded and curled from my hairline at the thought.
I’d found a way to block off that life force, to fence it in, just like T. Laine and the Nashville coven had blocked off the death and decay and captured it in shields to keep it from spreading.
“Ethel Myer and Carollette Myer Ames are related back four generations,” JoJo said, “when two first cousins married, so that gives us a recessive at that time. And their grandparents, two generations back, were second cousins. According to the witch-family lineages T. Laine sent me, there was an Ames witch family in Tennessee prior to the very late 1800s but nothing recent—” Her words broke off. “Hang on. Hugo and Carollette come from a common ancestor. The Ameses and the Myers all came from a common Ames witch line.”
Three generations back my parents had a common ancestor or two. All church families did. Keeping the family lines straight was paramount in polygamous churches. Did inbreeding in families with latent or recessive witch genes stimulate abnormal magical abilities and create unusual magic users? Like me? Like the gwyllgi? Like the ajasgili?
I had neutralized Brother Ephraim’s evil from the land. I had reclaimed the land from the death magic of the salamanders. I had used my magic to fight a demon. In each case there had been sacrifice, of myself and of blood. It nearly killed me. I had given myself to the land to heal it and had become a tree in the process, one time for six months. I almost didn’t make it back.